There are many circumstances in which a software application can display one or more digital images. In many instances, an application may only need a portion of an image. For example, the application may be configured to display a thumbnail image instead of a full high-quality image. Instead of using a thumbnail that is simply a smaller version of the full high-quality image, an application may instead display a cropped portion of the full high-quality image. A simple heuristic such as cropping based upon the location of the center of an image can result in a cropped image that does not contain one or more important visual elements from the image.